“Man on a Ledge” doesn't aim high, but what it aims to do, it does. It grabs the audience's attention, engages its anxieties, stokes its resentments and, at the finish, sends people out saying, “That was good.”

A year from now, no one will care about it or even think about it, but for right now, this is a movie pressing the right buttons.

The hard-to-resist premise would guarantee an audience in any climate: A falsely accused man (Sam Worthington), released from prison on a one-day pass, escapes, takes a room in a high-end New York hotel and steps out onto the ledge, threatening to kill himself. But the suicide threat and the traffic-stopping theatrics are just covers for something else — a high-risk, one-shot-in-a-hundred plan to exonerate himself before a live TV audience.

Fine. Good enough. Sold: Hit thrillers have been made from lesser ideas. But the something extra at work here is the way in which “Man on a Ledge” plays on the anger the audience is already feeling. Who put our hero behind bars? Of course, it was a big businessman (Ed Harris), covering for his crimes.

And who serves as the businessman's henchmen? None other than the government itself, represented here by a phalanx of corrupt policemen who know the truth but don't care — thugs who can murder with impunity.

This is no place for a history lesson, but if you go back to the Great Depression, the top movie villains were businessmen and cops. In bad times, the individual — the man alone, on the ledge, with nothing to rely on but courage and the truth — counts for everything, and organized authority is looked upon with fear and suspicion. We're there again.

The actors perform their important function of fleshing things out, taking a movie designed as an audience-pleasing machine and turning it into something human. Worthington has the right innate toughness, and he digs down to find the desperation to make sense off the character's actions, and Edward Burns is appealing as almost-jaded cop who still has a soul.

But the performance that lingers is that of Elizabeth Banks, as an officer specializing in talking down hostage takers and would-be jumpers. Banks knows she's playing a professional listener, and so she listens beautifully — watching and reacting with a natural empathy tempered by years of hearing lies.

Banks, who was Laura Bush in “W.,” deserves a role tailored to her specifications. In the meantime, she takes whatever they give her and makes it special, whether the role demands the harsh comic antics of “Our Idiot Brother” or the terror and despair of “The Next Three Days.” She makes “Man on a Ledge” feel like it's her story.

The height effects are done with considerable care. Worthington was certainly never in danger during the making of the film, but the illusion of being high up is complete. It's aided by the fact that Worthington himself never acts like a man who feels safe up there. So we don't, either.

Running time: 102 minutes

MPAA rating: PG-13 (violence, profanity)

mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

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